Support for HTML email is coming to BlackBerry devices. This week Adam Stanley, a consultant with RIM, confirmed that the new BlackBerry 6 will use the WebKit rendering engine for both the web and email. This was revealed in the comments section of his recent blog post.

What does this mean? Ideally, this will allow email recicipients to view your email completely: including images and layout. WebKit is the same engine that the iPhone, Palm and newer Android devices uses to display emails, with very good results.

Up until now, BlackBerries have not rendered HTML email properly: images were displayed as links and formatting was removed. This made it challenging to create eye-catching messages for mobile subscribers.

This new upgrade is a part of the new operating system (BlackBerry 6) that will be available on future phones by RIM. The first phone with the new OS is the BlackBerry Torch 9800.

If you send email to business people "on-the-go," they are likely using a Blackberry to read their email. The problem is that these devices do a terrible job of displaying HTML email. Even more confusing, instead of showing the "plain text version" they opt to show a stripped down HTML version. This is how this email looks on the Blackberry Curve:

This often creates confusion, as explained by this customer:

"We have a number of key people [in our organization] who check their email on smartphones, and they say our newsletters just don't look right."

What can you do? As a sender, you have a few options:

Ask your subscribers to enable HTML email on their Blackberries: if your list of Blackberry recipients is small, contact them and direct them to this tutorial on enabling HTML email functionality on their device (works on OS version 4.5+)

Create a sub-list of Blackberry users, and send them only plain-text emails: instead of sending a regular multi-part email (with both HTML and plain text bundled together), you can send a pure, plain-text email to Blackberry users. The plain text version can contain a link to the "online version" which will allow them to see the regular HTML layout.

Have us a create a "Mobile Version" link at the top of your emails: this will allow a reader on a mobile device to click and open the newsletter in a format more suited for smaller screens.

Put your most important text at the top of the email: the Blackberry screen isn't very big. It displays all of the text at the same size, with very few characters per line. If you want to keep your reader's attention, write short sentences that get to the point quickly.